Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/312

274 from Massachusetts Daniel Webster. Upon his speech, and, as Mr. Stephens says, &quot;even on his vote,&quot; the great issue hung suspended. The great patriot announced his conviction that this simple constitutional proposition should pass, closing his speech with words worthy of being heard still throughout the Union. &quot;Sir, my object is peace. My object is reconciliation. My purpose is not to make up a case for the North or to make up a case for the South. My object is not to continue useless and irritating controversies. I am against agitators North and South; I am against local ideas North and South, and against all narrow and local contests. I am an American, and I know no locality in America. That is my country. My heart, my sentiments, my judgment demand of me that I should pursue such a course as shall promote the good and the harmony and the Union of the whole country. This I shall do, God willing, to the end of the chapter. The vote was taken, and the amendment of Soule was adopted in the Senate by a vote representing two-thirds of the States.

President Taylor s death in July, 1850, at the moment of the controversy s highest heat, simply changed the situation sufficiently, through the influential aid of Fillmore, to permit the passage in separate bills of the compromise measures which Clay desired to group in one act. The policy of Clay was, in fact, carried out with no significant changes from the general plan he had proposed. These measures in general effect secured to California its right to be a State with a constitutional prohibition of slavery, removed the domestic slave trade from the District of Columbia and rendered the operation of the Missouri compromise line, so often proposed by Southern men as the partition line of the common territory, inconsistent with its avowed principle of non-intervention. In regard to the States, the measures declared their right to regulate their domestic institutions, and as to the use of the territories, the citizens of all States were placed,